Today, I was meant to be pushed for time because I was supposed to be moving furniture to my new place. Instead, I spent most of the day being rather sick, and was pushed for time because of that instead!

I almost decided to make a 'festive' sick bucket, but ultimately decided to revisit the mug I made before and do the UV-unwrapping and geometry tidy-up needed to texture it.

Day 17: A very quickly put together bauble. I was hoping to have time to figure out how to make it all shiny and reflective in the Cycles renderer, but alas ran out of time. Perhaps that's tomorrow's task!

Probably going to have to bow out of this sadly. At least from my original intentions anyway, home life has gotten particularly busy of late in the run up to christmas, along with my newly found gym and other habits I've not found much time for coding of late.

I definitely feel you there rychan. There's never enough time in a day!

I've only had about 20 minutes spare today, so I tried to figure out how to make my bauble look more reflective. After a bit of fiddling with the Blender Cycles material setup, I ended up with this mess for Day 18...

It's some hybrid attempt at mixing a glossy shader with the original texture and a glossy shader with my crappy skybox as an environment map, but it's quite clear I have no clue what I'm doing. I've subsequently found some proper instruction online, though, so perhaps I can learn to do this properly when I have more time.

Sadly nothing from me tonight, as I've been doing allllll the furniture moving that didn't happen on Sunday due to illness. About to take the last van load now! Hopefully regular service will resume tomorrow.

Day Twenty One

Managed a couple of bits and pieces, today. First, I finished off the Kakuro puzzles that I started yesterday.
They look like they work, but quite how solveable they are, I've no idea!! Either they're really hard, or I'm shit at them.. .. probably the latter!

As well as that, I added these creatures to the Sprite Generator thing. They're a bit weird, and kinda occasionally remind me of Mr Hanley.. *shrugs*
Tis the Season, I guess!

Those are some lovely creatures Jay. I do enjoy the various things your sprite generator can now make.

We've now moved all our stuff over, and I've found a spare half an hour to throw something together. But then it took me a while to figure out how to get a portable wifi hotspot going on my phone (because I mispelt the password in the setup without realising...) so this is a few minutes late.

Day 21: In honour of moving to a new house, here's a key! Didn't have time to make the geometry as detailed as I'd like (there's no hole for a keyring - eep!), but the broad features are there.

Jayenkai Is that one large texture, with opened areas, or is each one its own little texture!?

I UV-unwrapped the whole mesh so it's one large texture. That's what ended up taking most of the time, because I decided I wanted to try and be clever and have the whole front face unwrap to a single square, so that way I could draw a pattern for the whole front face and have it open up on the doors just like a real advent calendar. This was harder than I anticipated! But then, after all that effort, I didn't go and do a pattern for the whole front face to take advantage of this...

The unwrapped UV map looks like this:

And the texture for my image yesterday, based on that UV map, is:

All the little inlays are along the top of the image, and are just filled grey.

To demonstrate the fancy doors effect that this UV unwrapping lets me do, here's a different texture and its matching render:

You can see how the various bits of the tree fold out onto the opened doors, just like a real advent calendar.